“The obsession with shareholder value has turned businesses into soulless money machines. . . . Sustainability goals and public statements should be aggressive enough to make everyone nervous.”—Paul Polman, CEO Unilever (2009-2019)
The most famous scene in the now classic film A Few Good Men is perhaps all too well known: Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, shouts at the colonel played by Jack Nicholson. The former demands the truth and the latter fiercely replies by saying he can’t handle it. The colonel develops his case: the truth, often ‘grotesque’ and ‘incomprehensible’ to the simple-minded, is either nerve-wracking or outright inconvenient. And, as far as the colonel knows, it is only people of ‘honor’ and ‘loyalty’ who can stomach it.
While intended for a broad audience, Wayne Visser’s manifesto Thriving: The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, Society, and the Economy is ultimately meant for such folk—for people of honor and loyalty who can take a straight look at the truth of things and do something about it without shying away. Visser issues a bold call to respond to our biggest societal and biospheric challenges and convert them into opportunities to ‘thrive’. He writes convinced that ‘sustainability’—and even the new buzzword ‘regeneration’—are means towards that greater end. And he is (rightly) convinced that new, special kinds of business leaders have a fundamental role to play in the endeavor.
Below is my modest assessment of Visser’s encyclopedic compendium of auspicious companies around the world, drawing focus on the following:
- About the author
- The challenge for people in business
- How can companies (truly) thrive
- “Hot trends” in the business world
- Taking business further
- Embracing morality (and going beyond)
- Making it real in one’s company
1/ Who is Wayne Visser?
Next to his sharp mind, the man’s credentials are nothing short of admirable. Wayne Visser is a former director of sustainability services at KPMG and the founder of CSR International, a global knowledge hub advising businesses set to make a positive difference on the planet.
He is also a head tutor and fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership. As an “inclusive pracademic” blending best theory with even better practices, Visser has been recognized by Excellence and Trust as one of the top 100 thought leaders in trustworthy business. (And leading “practical thoughts” is indeed what he has to offer, proof of which are the 40 books he has published on the subject where he seamlessly interweaves theory and practice.)
Native to South Africa and well-traveled as a business sustainability consultant, Visser’s work is also genuinely international, drawing from a broad pool of success stories and trailblazing entrepreneurs around the globe. These “champions of life” and “guardians of thriving”, as he calls them, include not only CEOs of large companies but also unsung heroes from 40+ low-income nations. Next to his comprehensive vision and worldwide scope, one of the author’s distinctive features is the call to care for those beyond our tribe, whose lives, he affirms, “are so much harder but no less precious”.
2/ A Bold Challenge for Those Who Can Stomach It
Visser’s thriving manifesto is first and foremost predicated on the unique ability of humans to change and adapt. Such an ability, he affirms, is the true mark of intelligent people in our species: the flexibility that some have to leave behind old ways and embrace new ones.
Aiming to lay down a blueprint for what Klaus Schwab has called the “great reset of capitalism”, the book is also premised on hope itself, in a day and age when “nothing less than life itself” is at stake. And, in honor of such, Visser appeals to a living metaphor: a vast underground network of mushrooms that exchange vital nutrients and information. While not glossing away the ominous future that we face as humans, the author nevertheless recognizes an existing underground convergence of forces, mostly unseen to the superficial observer.
In contrast to what he names “incumbent leaders and institutions”, which continue to preach outmoded dogmas of “exponential growth in a finite system”, Visser devotes over 340 pages to challenging old, recalcitrant ways of running a company with those of honorable changemakers. In doing so, he recognizes that societies are close to a “chaos point” of negative reinforcing feedback loops manifested in runaway climate disruptions, depletion of soils, and contamination of watersheds. “Humans are an out-of-control virus”, he warns, and “contemporary economics is degenerative”.
Unlike most sustainability practitioners, the Cambridge pracademic is also straightforward in pin-pointing the “capitalist system obsessed with quarterly returns for absent shareholders” as one of the leading causes behind this economic epidemic. (Amidst a plethora of stats and figures, the book underscores a 15-year analysis by McKinsey, contrasting how companies with a long-term vision that invest in research and development show a 47% higher revenue growth than those that don’t.)
And it is precisely a long-term vision that’s urgently needed, the lack of which has led the sustainability guru to exhort business leaders to step up. Thriving leaders will work with living systems and not against them, recognizing, in practice, that the economy is “nested” within society and that society itself is entirely nested within the greater planetary ecosystem. Human economies should (and must) work with and within the one and only ‘Great Economy’ of the living world.
What is more, he urges leaders to stop “explaining away” negative externalities by embracing, instead, what he calls Integrated Value Management—a whole new way of running ‘net positive’ companies that aim at holistic prosperity, and not at growth. The way ahead is thus to be marked by new systems of circular innovation coupled with entirely new business aspirations, always undergirded by fresh political expectations led by “fringe” social movements committed to thriving.
Pointing to the legacy of CEOs in the likes of Annita Roddick from The Body Shop and Ivon Chouinard from Patagonia, the way ahead is to be led by entrepreneurial change makers “acting like revolutionary campaigners or crusaders”. Hence Visser’s call for bold and noble “missional leadership”.
3/ Companies that Are (Truly) Thriving
The catalog of thriving companies compiled by the sustainability guru is nothing short of vast. Visser’s scan around the globe fills his book with myriads of examples that are simply too numerous to be accounted for. They range from Interface’s ‘NetWorks’ harvesting discarded fishing nets in coral reefs and oceans to create upcycled carpets, to Ashoka’s spark of social entrepreneurs shifting societal mindsets and influencing public policy through research and advising work; from the Grameen Bank’s microcredits in Bangladesh to the more than 3,500 B-Corps around the world leading a fundamentally new way of doing business holistically for the benefit of all. Through examples like these, the book shows how the time has come for noble and honorable business leaders to shine. With “long-term cathedral thinking”, these innovators are, in Visser’s view, building an entirely new economy that we might not even live to see—at least not in its full, thriving potential.
Many such stories of leading companies await the reader in a highly enjoyable book, aided by the author’s seamless story-blending abilities. Visser surely captivates the reader’s attention from start to finish.
Instead, here one can simply summarize at least four dimensions that the Cambridge professor sees as fundamental in companies, governments, and organizations that have been defining the “radical innovation” that’s required to address the audacious tasks before us.
- “Stepping back” to give nature space to recover through “rewilding”. True, ecosystem services provide the human economy with benefits valued at $125 trillion/year. (Here we should consider, say, the ‘blue’ carbon stored in ocean biomes in the form of kelp, seagrass, and mangroves, or the potential of sequestering carbon via agroecological practices that build the soil instead of depleting it.) That being recognized, and despite the author’s emphasis on shifting to such ‘nature-based-solutions’, he nevertheless recognizes that we must also allow the living world simply to be itself—to exist on its own terms, without human intervention and regardless of the benefit it may or may not have to us.
- Responding to our global conundrum is not so much a ‘tech’ challenge but one of trailblazing legislation, reversed logistics, and new modes of human behavior. In line with what British economist Arthur Pigou put forward over a century ago, we must penalize negative externalities and reward, instead, positive ones. This means taxing waste (significantly), taxing carbon (even more significantly), and providing subsidies to industries in the (genuinely) circular economy. The purportedly ‘invisible’ (and often dumb) hand of the market must be led by the ‘visible’ (and firm) hand of governments. (The neoliberal reader who remains suspicious about such government intervention should consult people like Bill Gates, who has called precisely for such acute interventions as well.)
- In turn, this calls for positive lobbying that rewards thriving. Pride of place here falls on the European Union’s plastics strategy, the 2019 Basel Convention to regulate and restrict trade in hazardous materials, and the Green Deal in the United States. Thriving businesses advocate for robust social and ecological legislation that level up the entire business ecosystem.
- Blending key motivational forces with a “deep existential desire” to turn things around. These forces include an intellectual vigor that resists false ‘solutions’ and that advocates, instead, for new systems that are “biosphere positive”; collaborative people skills that motivate and bring others on board; political savviness blended with courage to take a stand without compromise and follow it though; radical innovation that goes precisely to the root of things.
4/ “Key Concepts” and “Hot Trends” in the Business World
In what Visser calls an “age of amnesia” marked by “dumb economics”, the book’s ten chapters are interspersed with nuggets and snippets summarizing key concepts and hot trends characteristic of thriving organizations. Calling for an “institutional symbiosis” led by experts, facilitators, catalysts, and activists, Thriving draws attention to new mindsets marked by “holism” and “systems thinking”. Next to some of the examples mentioned above, this includes a call for an eco-services economy that prioritizes:
- “Biofrabrication”, such as the North Carolina company Biomason’s ‘carbon positive’ bricks that are grown using bacteria at room temperature;
- “Urban mining” whereby ‘rooftops’ and ‘junkyards’ become the new ore mines, halting the bottomless appetite for conventional extractivist mining;
- Closed-loop design that separates techno- and bio-loops, favoring biosphere-positive “premediation” upstream instead of “remediation” downstream;
- Bioplastics made from solar-powered algae, currently being developed by companies in the likes of Algix, Notpla, Evoware, and other bio-innovators.
A common aim of these players is their commitment to creating a) carbon-positive products that are b) entirely bio-based and bio-sourced, and c) that are fully biodegradable.
5/ Further Steps for Business to Thrive
It is obviously impossible to say everything in one book, and this one is no exception. While providing hints along important directions, nevertheless some may be left wanting more details regarding a few important subject matters.
For one, at times one gets the impression that Visser has a rather too-close-of-a-trust on technology—and even on electrification. Should that be the case?
Likewise, the more curious reader would have wanted the Cambridge pracademic to engage other leading voices from the steady-state, ecological economics traditions; such as Tim Jackson, Herman Daly, Richard Heinberg, Bill Rees, or even the World Watch Institute. None of these appear in the book, however. Nor does the need to reduce global population levels and to reckon (and address) the nagging, unseen footprint of so-called ‘renewables’. In addition, the contrarian voices of UBC’s corporate critic Joel Bakan or former professor at Harvard Business School David Korten would have nuanced Visser’s book further, in their case with the muchly-needed critique of the corporate imperative to control and to grow at all costs.
That being said, Visser does not shy away from underscoring the need for ambitious policy and public incentives that enable the bold breakthroughs he endorses. As mentioned, the Cambridge ‘pracademic’ does call for a “highly visible” “missionary leadership” whereby business leaders take unconventional risks “acting like a revolutionary, campaigner, crusader, or activist”. Here he rightly gives pride of place to Anita Roddick from The Body Shop, Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia, and countless other unsung heroes from Ashoka or the Skoll Foundation.
And to his credit, too, he does acknowledge the need to go beyond a mere ‘technocentric’ reliance on partial—and, ultimately, false— ‘solutions’ that bypass the need to establish bold decisions in a solid bedrock of moral integrity.
Visser ultimately admits that the challenge goes far deeper.
6/ Much More than Morality
In what he calls an “age of obfuscation” where “morals are malleable” and “compromise common-place”, the Cambridge expert sees as a matter of duty that life should—and must—triumph over the commercial interests that are so pervasive today. Interestingly, here Visser appeals to the archetypal moral choices of the abolitionists of the 19th century—a movement, we may recall, itself largely inspired by religious convictions (and, more particularly, by the Christian convictions exemplified by William Wilberforce and his fellows from the Clapham sect).
While not explicitly philosophical or spiritual, the book does appeal to such ‘invisible’ moral horizons, which ultimately shape and determine the choices we make (or fail to make). Hence the author underscores the need to revisit what he calls the “eternal why” … Why must we respond? Why must companies, governments, and citizens radically shift direction?
Knowingly or not, and in one way or another, Visser’s answer goes back to 19th-century existentialism: an intellectual and cultural trend that has ever since made us believe that it is ultimately up to us to create our own meaning… to come up with our own answers as to why we exist. (In the business world, such a tendency has led more companies to embrace so-called “higher” purposes, for example.)
In the end, however, existentialism itself raises another set of questions: Whose ‘meaning’ should prevail? A ‘higher’ purpose according to whom? And whose ‘purpose’ is higher than whose—and by what standard?
These are massive questions requiring even more massive answers in a day and age that’s unconsciously allergic to any ‘standard’. But I simply raise them to underscore the importance of recovering good-old moral reasoning and philosophical inquiry in our companies’ decision-making processes (and, not least, in our shallow and destructive consumerist culture at large).
As the saying goes, ‘If you want new ideas, read old books’. For deep responses regarding how to cope with our future, could it be that we ought to look even deeper at our past? Shall we dare ask ourselves if the stories we’ve been trusting for the past four centuries since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions might need to be left behind, for good—be they existentialist, socialist, utilitarian, capitalist, or whatever? Is the time not ripe to unmask and undermine the myth of endless financial and material growth, which is now equaled to moral progress?
7/ Making It Real in Your Company
At this point, the practical reader may be asking herself more immediate questions: And now what? How do I even begin to make this real in my company?
Consider these four starting points:
First, start by actually reading Visser’s books; you will certainly be inspired and your curiosity satisfied. Commence with Thriving, for sure, and then explore his other ones as well. I would particularly recommend The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, as well as Sustainable Frontiers: Unlocking Change through Business, Leadership and Innovation.
Second, hire a sustainability specialist with proven knowledge and expertise along these lines. And do know that there are far too many greenwashing specialists out there; so make sure to apply rigorous filtering during the hiring process, including deep knowledge of LCAs, full familiarity with the principles of transformational CSR, and an orientation towards systems thinking.
Third, join a leading hub or professional network focused on transformational or ‘systemic’ sustainability. You’ll achieve more by joining hands with like-minded and like-hearted people. (The consulting firm Systemiq, from the B-Corp community, could be a good source of advice and comradeship in this respect.)
Fourth, but no less important, the commitment to ‘thrive’ must come from the very top. Hence create a new position in your company’s board and hire what Visser calls a “synthesizer”—someone who is open-minded, who thrives with innovating “radically” outside the box, and who can unify across differences. In an age of increasingly narrow, short-sighted, technopolist specialization, companies require people at the leadership level who have a broad vision, are apt and well-versed in the humanities, and can integrate and amalgamate diverse fields of knowledge holistically.
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So, with all that truth being said (and hopefully handled) … the challenge now turns over to you, daring reader. May you take heart and start thriving today and forever more.
